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None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe they are free — Goethe’s words frame this lecture from Academy of Ideas. It argues that the secret weapon of control is an abstract idea: the ‘greater good.’ Collectivism claims the individual exists for the sake of society, and ruling classes turn that slogan into a tool for demanding sacrifice. But Jung saw the flaw: society is only a concept, not a thing that lives. Against that abstraction, the video defends individual rights as the true foundation of freedom.
Full Video Transcript
The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority, but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.
Instead of respect for reason, open dialogue, freedom of speech, and individual and property rights, political systems across the world are becoming increasingly authoritarian.
Deceptions and lies, manipulation and propaganda, fear-mongering and psychological operations
are all being used to justify political actions and policies that destroy life.
How do politicians continue to convince the public to do away with their freedoms in favor of heavy-handed government control?
Why are so few people defending liberty when a world absent of it is a world of mass suffering?
In this video, we are going to examine these questions.
If freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, wrote Albert Camus,
this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective,
but also because her real defenders, through fatigue, through despair,
or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from her.
It is often said that one cannot solve a problem if one is not even cognizant of it.
And herein lies one of the reasons freedom is retreating so rapidly from our world.
Many people still believe themselves to be free, and as Goethe wrote,
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Those who believe themselves to be free disregard the fact that to be governed in the modern world is to be
watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at,
controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censored, and commanded, by beings who have neither the
right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. Accepting our lack of freedom is a necessary step
to counteract this undesirable condition. For so long as we remain in denial of the chains of
servitude that are upon us, we will do nothing to cast them aside. But when we acknowledge our
chains, we can begin to push back against them, and in the process, contribute to the creation
of a better world or as Camus noted the task of men is not to desert historical struggles
nor to serve the cruel and inhuman elements in those struggles it is rather to remain what
they are to help man against what is oppressing him to favor freedom against the fatalities that
close in upon it man’s greatness lies in his decision to be greater than his condition
And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself.
But widespread ignorance as to the lack of freedom is not the only reason why freedom is retreating from the world.
Rather, there is also an idea that has infected many minds and this idea, if not defeated,
could prove to be the kiss of death for freedom in our generation.
This idea is promoted by most politicians, indoctrinated into the youth at school and via popular culture,
and championed by the vast majority of talking heads in the mainstream media.
This idea is collectivism.
To understand what collectivism is, we must consider the question,
does the individual exist for the sake of society, or does society exist for the sake of individuals?
Those who adhere to collectivism believe that the individual exists for the sake of society,
and therefore that, the individual has to subordinate himself to, and conduct himself for, the benefit of society,
and to sacrifice his selfish private interests to the common good.
This collectivist mindset is foundational to communism, fascism, and socialism.
The common good, before the individual good, proclaimed one of collectivism’s most infamous adherents.
The doctrine of collectivism has been put into practice by many dictators such as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
Death, destruction, and suffering on a mass scale was the end result in each case.
How does placing the good of society above the good of the individual tend towards such unfortunate outcomes?
Is it not a display of compassion to sacrifice our personal interests for the greater good of our society?
At first glance, collectivism may seem to be a virtuous position to take.
But on closer investigation, a philosophical error called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
corrupts the practical application of this ideology.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness occurs when one treats what is merely an abstraction
as an entity that exists in the real world.
Collectivism, in claiming the individual must sacrifice his or her private interests for the sake of society,
society, takes what is merely a concept and treats such a concept as if it had
a concrete existence.
But as Carl Jung points out,
Society is nothing more than a term, a concept for the symbiosis of a group of human beings.
A concept is not a carrier of life.
In contrast to the individual that has a real existence in the world, society is an abstraction
used to represent an ever-changing collection of individuals living and interacting in proximity.
As far and as wide as one looks, one will never find a concrete entity called society
that we can point to and identify in the manner analogous to how we can identify an individual.
Society does not exist apart from the thoughts and actions of people.
It does not have interests and does not aim at anything.
The same is valid for all other collectives.
Or as Carl Jung put it,
Societal greater good and then granted the power to force individuals to act in service of this good
Since the dawn of civilization it has been ruling classes who anoint themselves the arbiters of the greater good and so not surprisingly
The greater good more often than not merely amounts to the good of those in power or as the 20th century psychologist
Nathaniel Brandon wrote with such collectivist systems the individual has always been a victim
twisted against him or herself and commanded to be unselfish in sacrificial service to some allegedly higher value
called God or Pharaoh or Emperor or King or Society or the State or the Race or the Proletariat or the Cosmos.
It is a strange paradox of our history that this doctrine, which tells us that we are to regard ourselves, in effect, as sacrificial animals,
has been generally accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for humankind.
From the first individual, who was sacrificed on an altar for the good of the tribe,
to the heretics and dissenters burned at the stake for the good of the populace or the glory of God,
to the millions exterminated in slave labor camps for the good of the race or of the proletariat.
It is this collectivist morality that has served as justification for every dictatorship
and every atrocity past or present the philosopher georg wilhelm friedrich hegel a staunch collectivist
who exerted a profound influence on the ideas of karl marx promoted collectivism’s negation of the
individual with the following words a single person i need hardly say is something subordinate
and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole hence if the state claims life
the individual must surrender it.
All the worth which the human being possesses,
he possesses only through the state.
Contrary to the philosophical trickery promoted by collectivism,
neither the greater good of society, nor the state,
nor any other concept used to describe a symbiosis of human beings
is superior to flesh and blood individuals,
whose spontaneous actions are the real creative and generative force in the world.
As the 19th century British philosopher Oberon Herbert wrote,
The individual is king, and all other things exist for the service of the king, or as he further explained,
The individual is included in many wholes.
His school, his college, his club, his profession, his town or county, his church, his political party, his nation.
But he is always greater than them all. All these various wholes, without any exception,
The conviction that the individual is king informed the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries,
and led to a rapid awakening to the vital connection between freedom and the individual rights of life, liberty, and property.
Generally speaking, individual rights specify that
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way,
so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.
Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental or spiritual.
Those who support individual rights are not motivated by an insensitivity to the plight and suffering of others,
but rather by the recognition that in granting each of us the freedom to pursue our own good,
social cooperation, the division of labor, and a prosperous society emerge in a bottom-up manner,
and thus the ability to help others also improves.
For without the wealth-generating mechanism of freedom,
all the good intentions in the world will not clothe, house, and feed the poor.
Collectivists claim the opposite.
An emphasis on the rights of the individual, they suggest, rather than on the greater good,
tends to inhibit social cooperation and promote an atomized population
in which every man and woman is an island left to fend for themself.
But here, collectivists have it backwards.
We are naturally social animals, and so the atomization of individuals only results when
a government, under the guise of the greater good, is granted the power to enforce social isolation,
or else to sow the seeds of fear and suspicion amongst friends and neighbors.
In his classic study of 20th century collectivist political systems, the medical doctor Joost Meerloo noted that
behind the Iron Curtain, the most prominent complaint in the totalitarian system was the feeling of mental isolation.
The individual feels alone and continually on the alert. There is only mutual suspicion.
Carl Jung, who lived through the totalitarianism which swept across mid-20th century Europe,
Likewise observed the mass state has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man
It strives for atomization for the psychic isolation of the individual the best way to promote social
Cooperation and a prosperous society is not through top-down centralized control
But to remove the clamps of control and to let individuals make their own choices with respect to their own lives
And this is what a society structured on individual rights accomplishes
Live and let live, as the age-old adage puts it, or as David Kelly explains,
who may not be used against their will for social purposes.
As individual rights leave us free to pursue our own good in our own way
so long as we do not aggress upon the person or property of others,
it follows that each of us has the right to freedom of speech,
freedom of movement, freedom of association and assembly,
the right to property and bodily autonomy,
and the right to work and retain the fruits of our labor.
Man is absolute lord of his own person and possessions,
Equal to the greatest, and subject to nobody.
Individual rights are universal in that they apply to all human beings everywhere.
Rights exist regardless of whether they are implemented in the legal constitution of a given country.
And they are inalienable in that they cannot be given or taken away by any man, government, or institution.
A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world.
And any infringement of them is equally a crime.
whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions, calling themselves
a government. When a society and the judicial system are predicated on a deep respect for
and commitment to individual rights, the individual is king and therefore the individual
is free. But when individual rights are transgressed under the pretext of public safety
or the greater good, the individual turns into mere political property which any mob or government
or institution in power can oppress, detain, or eliminate if deemed necessary.
As Lysander Spooner explained,
There is no difference between political and chattel slavery.
The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor,
and asserts that other men may own him and dispose of him and his property for their uses and at their pleasure.
In the modern world, we are moving ever closer to a widespread acceptance of collectivism
and thus the condition of political slavery to which Spooner alludes.
At times such as these, it is useful to recognize that while the majority are complicit in their servitude,
in standing on the side of freedom, we unite ourselves, in spirit, with all other guardians of freedom across the globe.
I rebel, therefore, we exist.
Braz Camus further wrote,
Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men.
Source: Academy of Ideas